1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to controlling printing equipment, and more specifically to a system and method for nesting finishing operations in a print environment.
2. Description of Related Art
High volume, high capacity printing systems have been developed that allow a variety of types of processing to be performed to the paper or other media upon which data is printed. An example of such printing system are completely automated systems that produce paper bills to be mailed to customers of utilities or other entities that mail a large number of bills. These high-speed printing systems are able to produce from several hundred to over one thousand pages per minute. These printing systems further have post-processing equipment to handle and further prepare the paper or other media that is processed by these printing systems or by successive systems (such as an off-line inserter). Examples of such post-processing equipment include machines that cut, fold, perforate, staple, edge stitch, post-print, unwind paper, insert sheets from the printer or other paper-supply sources into a stack of printer output, shrink wrap a collection of papers and stuff assembled packages of paper into envelopes for mailing. These processes are known as finishing operations.
Finishing operations are normally applied to a collection of sheets of paper, but some are applied to single sheets. Because many different post-processing devices can be attached to a printer, it is possible to apply several finishing operations to a collection of sheets and it is possible to nest collections to be finished within other collections to be finished. For example, some of the sheets of a print job might be perforated to provide for tear-off coupons and these sheets might be preceded and followed by other sheets that have no perforations; the entire print job might be corner stapled and 3-hole punched. These three finishing operations require nesting such that the corner staple operation is started first for the entire collection of sheets within the print job, nested within is a second operation (3-hole punch) that is also applied to each sheet of the print job, and finally some of the pages within the print job are perforated. When nesting finishing operations that are applied to groups of sheets, the outer operations are started first and applied last; the inner operations are started last and applied first.
Most of the current finishing solutions deal with finishing at the document level, and thereby avoid most of the issues dealing with nesting. These solutions do not involve finishing operations within a document, or among multiple documents. At a single level, e.g. the document level, the nesting of finishing operations can be managed simply by the order in which the operations are specified. To perform finishing operations outside the scope of a single level, the task typically must be done manually, consuming time and resources, and adding an opportunity to introduce human error.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above, and particularly for a method of nesting finishing operations in a print environment.